Restored Beckett artworks feature in 'Making it Modern'

An exhibition of Australia's pioneering modernist painters features restored paintings by Clarice Beckett on show together for the first time.

Know My Name: Making it Modern at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra looks at the work of six women modernists from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Beckett is considered one of the country's leading female artists of the early twentieth century, but she received little recognition during her lifetime.

She died in 1935 at the age of 48 and it was not until four decades later that about 2000 of her paintings were discovered in a barn in country Victoria.

Most had been destroyed, but the few hundred that did survive showed everyday scenes in a dreamy haze, painted in distinctive flat brushstrokes.

The best of Beckett's work is decades ahead of its time, according to National Gallery of Australia curator Elspeth Pitt.

"It is so minimal that it pre-empts the idea of pure abstraction that only became more popular 15 to 20 years after Beckett had passed away," she told AAP.

At one of the first exhibitions of the artist's work after she died, former gallery director James Mollison bought eight paintings, making the gallery the first public institution to acquire her work.

It prompted the artist's sister Hilda Mangan to give the institution another two dozen artworks.

Gallery conservator Jocelyn Evans has spent three years cleaning up these donated paintings in between other projects, removing varnish, righting warped supports and fixing edges that were worse for wear.

The paintings have been re-framed in specially made reproduction Thallon frames - a simple, gilded style that the artist favoured.

"It's absolutely brilliant to show these beautiful little works, post this very comprehensive conservation treatment in these spectacular new frames," said Pitt.

These will be on display alongside Mollison's Beckett acquisitions for the first time in Making it Modern, which also features the work of Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Olive Cotton, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme.

Keen gallery-goers may already have seen the artworks by Spowers and Syme, on show as part of a recent exhibition that toured Australia.

But Making it Modern is a chance to see them in the context of their contemporaries, and there are some fascinating comparisons to be made.

Spowers and Syme were both daughters of newspaper magnates and could afford materials and travel to learn about the latest printmaking techniques.

Beckett came from a comfortable background too, yet had considerably less freedom: she was obliged to care for her elderly parents at home, painting outdoors or on the kitchen table as she was not permitted a studio.

The exhibition is part of a broader gender equity initiative by the gallery called Know My Name, which is having a broad and genuine impact on the broader art sector and public, according to Pitt.

It's especially germane to Australian modernism, where women artists were in many cases leading innovators.

The foresight of other past curators also means the national collection has especially strong holdings of works by Margaret Preston and Olive Cotton.

"There's a great history at the National Gallery of curators really researching women artists and actively acquiring their work, and some of the fruits of that are certainly evident in this exhibition," said Pitt.

Know My Name: Making it Modern is a free exhibition at The National Gallery of Australia and runs from August 5 to October 8.